When Cheri Steinkellner was a child, she would watch the Million Dollar Movie, where a viewer could see a single film every day for a week and twice on the weekend. She remembers distinctly that one of those movies was the 1950 Judy Garland-Gene Kelly musical “Summer Stock.” She and her cousin watched all week and had it memorized so they could perform it at a family dinner on Sunday.

Steinkellner grew up to become an acclaimed writer. She and her husband, Bill Steinkellner, are a screenwriting team best known for their work on the iconic sitcom “Cheers” and the animated TV show and movie “Teacher’s Pet.” They were nominated for a Tony in 2011 for their work on the musical adaptation of “Sister Act.”

And now Cheri Steinkellner has come back around to “Summer Stock.” She has written the book for a new stage adaptation of it that gets its world premiere at The Goodspeed starting July 6.

Getting the call

Commercial producers hired Steinkellner to adapt “Summer Stock,” and, after Goodspeed folks saw a reading of an early version of that, they wanted to slot it in for their 2023 season.

(Steinkellner is quite familiar with Goodspeed, having developed the musicals “Hello! My Baby” in 2011 and “Princesses” in 2004 at Goodspeed’s Terris Theatre in Chester.)

“They were in need of a fast writer fast. There was not a lot of time. Coming out of TV, where basically our job is to put on a play in five days 26 times a season for 10 seasons, fast is what I do,” Steinkellner said during a recent interview at Goodspeed in East Haddam.

Her first move was to rewatch “Summer Stock” to see what it looks like now, decades later. She got out her Judy Garland boxed set and viewed “Summer Stock” on DVD.

“I already had my writer’s head on and my adapter’s head, so I was trying to figure what from this movie can we pull and expand to really tell these characters’ stories because the film was built around the talents of the MGM lot — ‘More stars than there are in heaven.’ … When you’ve got those stars and those personalities, then the shape of the films can in large part be dictated by the stars and their charisma and so forth,” she said.

When creating a musical, she focused on the characters and their stories — where the characters start, where they mess up and complicate each other’s lives, how they try to make it better and end up making it worse, and then how they resolve everything.

Let’s put on a show

In the movie “Summer Stock,” a performer named Gloria brings her fellow actors to her family’s farm in rural Connecticut to put on a show. Her sister, Jane, who runs the farm, isn’t happy about it but agrees to the idea, since the farm needs workers. The show’s director and Gloria’s fiance, Joe, finds himself attracted to Jane — and vice versa.

Kelly played Joe in the movie; Corbin Bleu, who became famous with “High School Musical,” plays Joe at Goodspeed.

Danielle Wade, who starred in “Mean Girls” on Broadway and on tour, takes on the Judy Garland role of Jane.

As she was reworking “Summer Stock,” Steinkellner not only considered the main triangle; she also expanded the supporting stories.

She liked the idea of the city mice — the show people — and the country mice — the farm people — being so different yet coming together to save both the farm and the show in one unified way.

“Anyone who has ever put on a show, new or old, knows that feeling when it feels like it’s going to fall apart but it starts to gel. We as a community of differently talented people all work together to make this thing that’s going to make people feel. There’s nothing like it. It’s a really, really good feeling,” Steinkellner said.

The film, though, didn’t have diverse characters.

“So we wanted to find a good, strong reason to purposefully bring a cast of characters together that represent our world. We talked a lot about color conscious casting,” Steinkellner said.

In the stage version, the band of wannabe Broadway actors are old Army buddies who played to the troops during World War II to great success. But they are having trouble pushing their show forward in the civilian world.

A playlist where you’d never skip a track

There were only nine songs in the film “Summer Stock.” Steinkellner has brought in more for the stage version, and not all of the selections in the movie made the transition to the stage.

Her goal was to curate a playlist where you’d never skip a track because every one was so good.

Steinkellner pulled tunes from the public domain, which boasts numbers written before 1927. Many of those tunes also returned to popularity in the mid-century, thanks to covers by stars like Frank Sinatra and, yes, Judy Garland.

Steinkellner said it was fun to cherry pick songs that could help tell the “Summer Stock” tale. She rewrote some of the lyrics to better fit the characters and plot.

“I hope people won’t be able to tell what is original to the show and what is original to the original song,” she said.

Steinkellner and musical supervisor/arranger/orchestrator Doug Besterman wanted to integrate the tunes into “Summer Stock” as seamlessly as possible. She said it’s about “helping the song sing in the character’s voice and tell the story that we need to tell. It’s really important to me that I’m never just waiting until we get on with the story, that I have an understanding, whether it’s spoken in lyric or conveyed in emotion, that life is always happening.”

As “Summer Stock” was being developed the last few months, there were times the story shifted, and so Steinkellner went back to find a new song that would better fit the latest rewrite.

“Somehow in this beautiful Great American Songbook, there’s always the perfect song that I didn’t know until the moment arose for it. And I go, ‘Oh, you, come with me. We’re putting you back on the stage,’” she said.

She found an Irving Berlin composition she hadn’t heard that now serves as “Summer Stock’s” Lindy Hop number.

“I’m so excited to find an Irving Berlin song that I hadn’t been aware of,” she said.

And when looking for a tune to open the second act, she gave Besterman and director/choreographer Donna Feore a list of titles to consider. Steinkellner wanted a song that would serve as “A Real Nice Clambake” did in “Carousel,” indicating post-intermission, she said, that “we’re happy to be back, settle in your seats, hope you had a good intermission, we’re back on the farm, we’re having a good time.”

Besterman said “June Night” sounded like a good second-act opener. Steinkellner went back and listened to the only recording she could find, by the Ray Conniff Singers.

“As soon as I heard it, I went, ‘Oh, “June Night” is exactly the right idea. And what if while they’re singing this song, we have all these city kids sitting around in the countryside. What if they see their first firefly and they hear their first cricket and owls, things that you don’t hear or feel or see in the city?’

“So Doug takes that and makes it into a whole Pentatonix kind of thing where we’re now bringing in all the noises of a summer night in Connecticut in song. It’s such a delight,” she said.

Steinkellner noted that “Summer Stock” is also a big dance musical, which is kind of a “Pinch me, I’m dreaming” moment for her, since she’s written a lot of comedies and musicals but nothing with this much dance.

“To write the two little words, ‘dance break,’ and to see it blow up into this marvelous, athletic, miracle that blows my mind … (with) the simplest step I could never do and many of them I could never even imagine in my head,” she said, adding that it “overwhelms the senses, takes your breath away and makes us all just so happy.”

She noted that there is a great variety of dance, too, from the aforementioned Lindy Hop to a hoedown to the Charleston.

About the characters

Although there are many changes, Steinkellner thinks the hearts of the characters are the same in the Goodspeed version as in the film. Jane is still a very practical family farmer trying to make things work.

But the stage adaptation builds up the backstory of how this farmgirl is also a major triple-threat performer who sings “Get Happy” in a fedora and stockings at the end of the show.

As for Joe, Steinkellner said the motivation and character changed greatly going from Kelly to Bleu.

Echoing her earlier comments, she said, “We really set out to create something that was going to be a color conscious new telling of this period story.”

A diverse cast of talented people have come together under the directorship of Bleu’s Joe, who has held this group together for five years. He encourages them, saying they will entertain audiences in America the way they entertained troops during the war.

The story is set in 1950, and, in reality, it wasn’t until nine years later that a Black man directed a Broadway show. So, realistically, Steinkellner said, “They’re not going to get this show to Broadway, but they are going to get this up and find a home where they can all play at the top of their game together. It saves the farm and the show — and creates this thing called summer stock, in the telling of our show.”

She said the cast in “Summer Stock” at Goodspeed is “staggeringly good.” They are, she said, “thrilling me with their talent and the heart that they’re bringing to it.”

The lure of co-creating

Steinkellner wasn’t expecting to be working on a project like this after a decade-long hiatus from theater; during that time, she went back to school and earned a couple of degrees, including one in depth psychology.

“This is a chapter in my life that I did not see coming. You know, the hunkering down of the last several years, I discovered, really suited me. I like working in my jammies. I mean, I didn’t put on mascara for how long? It was great! My husband laughs at me because I call my side of the bed ‘my office’ and my chihuahuas are my writing staff,” she said.

“I did not expect to be coming back into the world and putting on shoes and mascara and working in a community … The energy of it and the lure of co-creating — man, I love my dogs, but this is really a lot of fun.”

If you go

What: “Summer Stock”

Where: The Goodspeed, 6 Main St., East Haddam

When: July 7-Aug. 27; 3 and 7:30 p.m. Wed., 7:30 p.m. Thurs., 8 p.m. Fri., 3 and 8 p.m. Sat., and 2 p.m. Sun.; also 2 p.m. shows on select Thursdays and 6:30 p.m. shows on select Sundays

Tickets: Start at $30

Contact: (860) 873-8668, goodspeed.org